Help hard to come by for Colchester homeless

Numbers shift almost daily, there are anywhere from two to a dozen or more homeless people in Colchester, a community that prides itself on being a good place for families and small business and was named the 57th best place to live in the United States in 2005 by CNN/Money Magazine.

“Do you know about the captain?” Dean Carli asked. “I’ll take you to him.”

We was talking about the grave site of Capt. James Newton, a merchant sailor who died in 1739 and whose remains are in Colchester’s old burying ground in the center of town.

It’s also the place where Carli, a town native, lived for four months last summer. The large engraved stone slab over the grave, called a table stone, is where the 53-year-old slept when he wasn’t looking for work or for a meal.

And it’s a place, he said, where he’s come full circle, in a way.

“I used to bring girls here when I was a kid,” he said. “You know what I mean?”

Numbers shift almost daily, but Carli is one of anywhere from two to a dozen or more homeless people in Colchester, a community that prides itself on being a good place for families and small business and was named the 57th best place to live in the United States in 2005 by CNN/Money Magazine.

Living with the elements

"I’ve lived out in the cold,” Carli said between sips of a cup of milk at a recent free community lunch put on by volunteers at the Colchester Federated Church.

“The hardest thing about when it gets cold is that they turn off all the water spouts and hoses and spigots in town. But you’ve got to find water. It’s the most important thing.”

An alcoholic who spent some time at a Willimantic shelter and was trying to get housing early last year, Carli said he was drugged and robbed, and that a paperwork “screw-up” prevented him from getting into a halfway house.

“I was on the recovery side,” he said. “And then I was told I would have to wait and be homeless, and I started drinking and that was it.”

He lives day-to-day, and didn’t know where he would get his few hours of sleep that night. He said a person he knows, Billy, has a house and owes him a favor.

“It’s an option,” Carli said.

Giving Carli and others like him more options is what some local residents set out to do two years ago.

It was a bitterly cold night in December 2010 that prompted discussions at two separate meetings, of the town’s Rotary and Lions Club, to find ways to help.

A small group of residents started meeting in January 2011.

Mixed data

Members of the Colchester Coalition Against Homelessness tried to get informal counts, but statistics are hard to come by. According to the group, local social services departments, clergy and police do not keep counts of the homeless.

A Jan. 29 point-in-time count of homeless in Connecticut, conducted by volunteers every two years and mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, found none in Colchester, according to Erik Clevenger, a regional count coordinator and housing director of Reliance House Inc., in Norwich.

“We found an encampment, but no one was staying there,” he said. “We have, in the past, housed folks who were literally homeless, in the woods.”

Clevenger said he had assisted four people in that situation.

“We were told initially there were 30 to 50 people. We have not found that at all,” he said. “There are probably a handful of people in that situation.”

Others in town became aware of the problem and want to help.

Mike Fiondella has at times stayed in woods off Norwich Avenue, across the street from Town Hall. He said he’s seen as many as seven or eight people living there.

An out-of-work paver, Fiondella said the town has no services for the unemployed or homeless.

“This town has nothing,” he said. “They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new sidewalks for downtown, but we can’t get a bus route or place for people to stay.”

Driven to action

Finding places for anyone homeless in town should be easy, Lisa King says.

Something a friend said early last fall to King drove the Colchester woman to take action.

“Someone who’s with the fire department said they saw something and it upset them,” King said recently at the Colchester Farmers Club, where she works as a bartender.

That something, according to the person, whom King didn’t identify, was a family of adults and children living in a wooded area in town.

“And I knew we had to do something,” King, a lifelong town resident, said. “These kids were somehow still getting to school every day, but were staying in the woods.”

She took to Facebook, angry that some in town were offering a $750 reward to find who burned a scarecrow display on the town’s green but that nothing was being done to help children living outdoors.

Reached out to town

She reached out to the first selectman, Gregg Schuster, but wasn’t satisfied with the town’s response.

“We have all this space in town,” she said. “We can’t find a little spot for these people?”

King wants Colchester to use what it has to shelter anyone who needs a temporary place to stay. She’s suggested the old Bacon Academy building on Main Street and even the third floor of Town Hall, where food and other items the Social Services department stores for the needy is kept.

Page 3 of 4 - The town offers temporary emergency shelter at its schools during storms. But setting up a full-time shelter appears beyond reach.

“We really don’t have the facilities to be capable of operating a shelter on a sustained basis,” Schuster said. “It’s not so much about having a shelter as being able to provide services for those with mental health and substance abuse issues. If you have a shelter, you have to make sure those services are available.”

Schuster said the town would be “more than happy to transport individuals to any of the regional shelters that do offer those services.”

That doesn’t mean nothing is being done in town, however.

Free lunches offered

Late in 2011, the Colchester coalition started offering free daily lunches at two local churches, St. Andrew’s Church and the Colchester Federated Church.

Initially, the thought was to give people bagged lunches so they wouldn’t be hungry. But when winter arrived, the idea of a warm lunch and a warm place to pause while eating gained momentum.

From as few as two to as many as 16 people have attended the daily lunches.

“This is great,” Carli said recently while visiting a lunch at St. Andrew’s Church. “They’re very friendly. They put out lots of food. One thing I hate to see is food being thrown out. Don’t throw it out.”

Last March, the coalition began offering weekly visits by the Generations Mobile Medical Clinic. It offers health care services for people who have no insurance or who have limited resources, and no one will be turned away. The clinic is fully staffed with a physician and medical assistant. Dental visits also can be scheduled.

And information-gathering is part of the efforts to get a handle on the problem.

Last September, 12 people who attended the free lunches were surveyed about their living conditions. The anonymous survey was conducted by Clevenger and David Pascua, housing supervisor for the Southeastern Mental Health Authority.

Two of the 12 respondents said they were homeless. One had been homeless more than one year, which HUD defines as chronically homeless. Most of the respondents were local residents.

The coalition plans to present the results to community groups as well as the town. The hope is that numbers will show that a need exists, and that more help will be made available.

Deep-rooted problem

Father Martin Jones says the problem is systemic, and change is needed from the top down.

Jones is helping a 28-year-old New Jersey man who is in Colchester and seeking housing. The man is jobless and has mental health issues, Jones said.

“He’s been here since November and still doesn’t have a place tonight in Colchester,” Jones said. “People here without a home bounce from place to place. Some stay at a relative’s house on occasion. Some end up living in tents outside.”

Page 4 of 4 - Jones, the Bishop’s Delegate for Evangelization in Hispanic Ministry in the Diocese of Norwich, is trying to help the man complete required paperwork that would help him get into temporary housing and get a job.

“In order to get housing, he needs a job,” Jones said. “And that’s impossible at this point, because he doesn’t have a residence, which applications ask for.”

Jones has tried to get help through Reliance House, the Marlborough Clinic and others with no success. An application for the man to live in local housing is held up because of incomplete paperwork, Jones said.

‘Incredible resources’

"We have incredible resources in this country,” Jones said. “How they are allocated is the problem. There’s a sense of denial, too. No one wants to acknowledge the problem.”

In the old cemetery, Carli was amused when he found items he had kept there during his stay last year,such as a jug hanging from string on a fence.

“I wonder what I put in that,” he said.

He’s not worried about his own situation, saying he’s strong and that he takes everything day by day.

“But there are kids out there, too,” he said. “Drug use is big in town. We have 11 full-time cops in this town. We don’t need that many. Lay off one cop and use the money to help people that really need it.”